Brent Arthur Wilson, public enemy #275,000

A trial date has been set for 12 July.  Another omnibus hearing is scheduled for 10 June regarding charges for one or more other properties.  I really hope evidence about the home equity loan Brent was supposed to have started the process for comes to light.  That is what makes his case truly emblematic of the YIIKes decade's real estate pyramid scheme.  At his most recent hearing Brent took the dare to make even less sense than before.  From the Missoulian article:

[Judge] Christopher again asked Wilson to accept legal representation from the public defender’s office, again told him she could not rule on any motion that hadn’t been made in writing, and again warned him she would not accept nor perform and fiduciary responsibility in the matter even if he did request it in writing.

“I cannot assume that, I cannot practice law, I can perform only as a judge in this case,” she told him.

“Well,” Wilson announced, “I think it’s apropos then that, for the record, on the record, let the record show that I reiterate the situation from last May 20.”

And this is what he went on to say:

“I, Brent Arthur Wilson the man; on the land, born of spirit, of issue, of messiah on the most high; grantor, trustor, settler of the all capitals B-R-E-N-T A-R-T-H-U-R W-I-L-S-O-N Trust; do appoint and nominate District Court Judge Deborah Kim Christopher as the trustee for the Express Revocable all caps Brent Arthur B-R-E-N-T A-R-T-H-U-R W-I-L-S-O-N Trust, with the following three points of law:”

He went on to talk about trusts.

“The purpose for which a trust may be created is the tangent purpose of the settler in truth. It is the law of the trust,” he said, adding that “Brent Arthur … the man is not defaulted as the trustee for the all capitals B-R-E-N-T …”

Well, you get the picture.

“Do you have any evidence to the contrary, Your Honor?” Wilson asked when he was finished.

The other news was how Brent is in the news.  Even the Facebook group I created about Brent is getting some media attention.  OK, it got some local medium attention as part of an article in the Missoulian about Brent gaining national notoriety.  The group's entire manifesto (i.e. description) was reprinted, and I can't ask much more than that.  Alright, I can ask for a link to the group in the online edition, but a Facebook group is easy enough to find.

The article begins with:

When Assistant Lake County Attorney Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson plugged Brent Arthur Wilson’s name into an Internet search engine Wednesday afternoon, it delivered 4,000 hits.
When she tried it again Thursday morning, it was up past 6,000.

That would have been the 20th and 21st of May.  I don't know which search engine or how she entered the search.  Asking the Googles today about "Brent Arthur Wilson" returns 93 unique pages, and about 800 to 7,200 if you include everything with his name that is a link to one of those pages and each time that link shows up on a site.  I've got over 150 posts and a label with his full name, so if you tell Google to show you every single entry you'll get over 150 links to this blog alone.  It's a similar situation with the Missoulian's site and any other media site in Montana with a news section that picked up at least one article about Brent.  Searching for "Brent Wilson" isn't going to work, as that guy is a rugby star and bass player who also happens to be a legitimate real estate agent in several states.  Entering Brent Arthur Wilson without quotes returns almost 800 unique results out of a possible 275,000.  Most of those are not about anyone named Brent Arthur Wilson, are from news/blog aggregators, or are the results of searches run on other sites, including searches that aren't about our Brent.  That search does return several pages about Brent that are outside of Montana and aren't the News of the Weird entries previously mentioned.

It's not possible to get a good fix on how many sites have written about Brent.  Regardless of the search method used, here are some other examples of Brent's growing notoriety.

Domestic Terrorists or Fierce Patriots? on the investment / money management site Main Street, Seth Fiegerman followed up on Tristan Scott's article from the Missoulian in comparing Brent and Jackiya Ford (whom the article is mostly about) with the all-American domestic terrorists - white stupidists supremacists & separatists - for appropriating the sovereign citizen & redemption scams.  Mr. Fiegerman wrote about sovereign citizens:

They want to rely on common law rather than federal law and restore a certain simplicity to America. The hope is that they can get rid of the big banks and big government so they can be free to live in this country without being “hijacked” by these imposing forces. In essence, they are arguably a more zealous and extreme version of the Tea Party movement. Sovereign Citizens promote individual liberties, but they also have taken controversial steps that endanger fellow citizens; members bill themselves as true patriots and yet they break laws and take steps to undermine the government.

The comparison is hardly new.  I read it a few places before writing this in a post commenting on the Missoulian article:

Some of the more extreme tax protesters have been linked with white separatists / supremacists. Lots of people have already connected the extremist tax protesters to the Tea Baggers Party, and Tea Party rhetoric sounds a lot like sovereign citizen / redemption rhetoric.

Wow!  The Tea Party isn't exclusively white after all!

If you like it when Tea Baggers go ballistic, be sure to read the comments on Mr. Fiegerman's article.

Brent has been linked to the white stupidists and their sovereign citizen's scam by Rick Ross.  The articles are just reprints from the Missoulian, but getting listed on Mr. Ross' site usually qualifies you as a dirtbag.

Some nimrod stopped by the Tree of Liberty forum trying to sell the sovereign citizens scam as a way to "achieve true justice."  Two Missoulian articles about Brent were used to demonstrate how ridiculous the scam is.  If Objectivists who are still getting ready to survive a post-Y2K meltdown and veer into Black Helicopter territory now and then think something promising freedom from the government is crazy you know it's fucking crazy.